ELECTION 2006Candidate says comment made at Houston club in 1980 was part of his satirical act

AUSTIN - Kinky Friedman's use of a racial slur in his outrage-humor stage show in 1980 caused a firestorm Thursday in the governor's race as critics said the satirist too frequently engages in racially charged comments.

The controversy has been smoldering for two weeks, ever since Friedman said many of the Hurricane Katrina evacuees remaining in Houston are "crackheads and thugs." Most of the evacuees are black.

On Thursday, a Democratic-leaning Internet site, The Burnt Orange Report, poured fuel on the fire by airing the outtake from Friedman's April 16, 1980, appearance at Rockefeller's in Houston.

Friedman said the controversial comment should not be taken seriously because it was part of a stage show meant to offend everyone in the audience.

"It was a pretty raunchy show and follows in the footsteps of Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce," Friedman said. "We had a bunch of walkouts."

Pryor had routinely used the slur until he visited Kenya in 1979. Then he promised to never use it again and apologized for any harm it had done to his fellow African-Americans.

"Never apologize for something that was coming from the right place," Friedman said. "I'm not a racist. I was an idealist when I was young. Now I'm a realist."

Friedman said his show was meant to tell truths about society through satirical humor.

"It was an equal opportunity offender. To pull out one joke is not fair because there was homophobic stuff, there was sexist stuff. There were Jewish jokes and there were Hispanic jokes."

Friedman said he may have stood on a stage and told such jokes as part of the entertainment industry, but he said his heart has always been in the right place.

He said he joined the pickets at an Austin restaurant called The Plantation on 19th Street in the 1960s to get the restaurant integrated. He noted 19th Street is now Martin Luther King Boulevard.

"Don't confuse the real man with a satirical stage show. And if you do, you're going back pretty far, and I was always an equal opportunity offender," Friedman said.

Audio of Friedman's joke was distributed anonymously to news organizations Thursday. Only the joke was available, not the entire routine.

But his political opponents and African-American leaders found the stage-show comment inappropriate in any venue.

"I was highly offended by that," said Gary Bledsoe, Texas president of the NAACP, adding that it dehumanized African-Americans.

Bledsoe said ethnic comedians make racial jokes all the time, but "there's a certain line they do not cross. This is way over the line."

'Clearly racist'

State Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, said, "If he gets a pass on this, then the next David Duke gets a pass." Duke was a Ku Klux Klansman who ran for governor in Louisiana.

The Burnt Orange Report posting for the Friedman audio was done by Coleman's press secretary, but Coleman said his office had nothing to do with making it public.

They also had been critical of Friedman for saying sexual predators should be sentenced to prison to "listen to a Negro talking to himself." The interview on CNBC last year was posted this week on the Internet site YouTube.com.

Gov. Rick Perry was asked early in the day about Bledsoe and Coleman's anger over Friedman's Negro comment before the other comment became public.

"These are individuals who know what a racist comment is," Perry said. "You can shade them by calling them politically incorrect if you want, but it is not lost on men and women of color when people make remarks that are clearly racist, if not directly racist, obliquely racist."

"The latest revelations of Kinky's racist comments are disgusting. He can call it 'satire,' but it's just not funny," said Democrat Chris Bell, whose launch of his new television commercials was overshadowed by the controversy.

Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who like Friedman is running as an independent, said, "The language Kinky Friedman used in 1980 was totally unacceptable then, and is totally unacceptable now. ... Such language is divisive and hurtful and has no place in any part of our society, regardless of one's race."

Increased scrutiny

Friedman stirred a critical examination of his past two weeks ago in Houston by saying the Hurricane Katrina evacuees left in the city were "crackheads and thugs." Later, in San Antonio, he said politicians who pander to minorities are racist.

"I don't eat tamales in the barrio; I don't eat fried chicken in the ghetto; I don't eat bagels with the Jews for breakfast," he said. "That, to me, is true racism."